Hi All,
I would like your advice. I'm helping a young company set up a ROR team from entry level to Senior A/P. I've not worked with this tech before so have some basic questions.
What are your thoughts: Is this a well exploited technology in Scotland/UK? What's the typical career path for an RoR A/P ( from a PHP background or other)? If a CS grad, is it difficult to pick up - how long would you think it takes to become proficient?
Thanks in advance for any insights shared.
Deirdre
Deirdre Shell wrote:
Hi All,
I would like your advice. I'm helping a young company set up a ROR team from entry level to Senior A/P. I've not worked with this tech before so have some basic questions.
What are your thoughts: Is this a well exploited technology in Scotland/UK? What's the typical career path for an RoR A/P ( from a PHP background or other)? If a CS grad, is it difficult to pick up - how long would you think it takes to become proficient?
Thanks in advance for any insights shared.
Deirdre
Firstly, it doesn't matter how well exploited the technology is because the support you (may) require for it can be done remotely. This includes hosting, of course. RoR already has an extensive community and a growing API, with support from major banking bodies and other industry-specific experts.
Secondly, A CS graduate is likely to have studied C of some variation and should, considering their assumed capabilities, be able to understand the structure of Ruby and the way in which it communicates with Rails.
Thirdly, may I ask why you have nominated the use of RoR? Surely, it would be better to let the Senior team decide which language is more suitable. I am asking this in spite of using RoR myself.
“If a CS grad, is it difficult to pick up - how long would you think it takes to become proficient?”
It will be very difficult if you are just a CS grad.
ROR is a framework of whole set of web technologies. So, it will be very difficult to master it in less than 6 months.
You need a strong web development technical leader with reasonable ROR expertise for atleast a year.
CS graduates dont get educated with open source technologies. They usually come up with Java background.
If you get graduates with PHP background and who have self-learnt Ruby languages, you are lucky.
Put an advertisement in ROR job sites, eg
and see how many are turning from Glasgow.
I would like your advice. I'm helping a young company set up a ROR team from entry level to Senior A/P.
Firstly, I'd query why there has been a choice of any technology
platform without anyone of experience to decide? Normally, I'd expect
the CTOs platform of experience is what's plumbed for. What's the
rationale for RoR? (not that it's necessarily a bad choice! 
What are your thoughts: Is this a well exploited technology in Scotland/UK?
In Scotland, you might try to ask at http://rubaidh.com/company - although they may not be inclined to respond if you're starting a competitor!
In the rest of the UK there does seem to be a fair spread of us, but it is a small pool.
If a CS grad, is it difficult to pick up - how long would you think it takes to become proficient?
Very few people I have met are straight to Ruby/RoR from uni. The majority have arrived after a period of their career and are thus quite senior. As far as CS grads (or self-taught techies) are concerned, you may find yourself in the position of having to teach them everything - even re-teach a some of what they've covered in their courses - from HTML, CSS upwards. But on the flip side (and I worked with one guy like this) very bright people *can* pick stuff up very quickly.
Thanks in advance for any insights shared.
If you'd consider temporary help - even consultation advice while you set up your team. Feel free to get in touch directly - I'm a freelance developer.
Regards
PH, Thank you for the reply. I am trying to assess how available A/Ps will be hence this question. What's API mean here? The company already use RoR, they are looking for more developers, that's where I have come in.
Deirdre
Pale Horse wrote:
Deirdre Shell wrote:
PH, Thank you for the reply. I am trying to assess how available A/Ps will be hence this question. What's API mean here? The company already use RoR, they are looking for more developers, that's where I have come in.
Deirdre
Firstly, the availability of RoR Developers in the area specified is impossible for me to determine but there is *certainly* a lot of logic in making the opportunity available to CS graduates; as I said, they should be more than capable of understanding Ruby and the way in which it communicates with Rails.
Secondly, an API is an interface that considers the expansion and development of an application by providing it with support and information for additional implementations. http://api.rubyonrails.org/ is a specific example of this.
My apologies, I assumed the company had no current developers and were looking to build a team from the foundations.
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